Nokia Set to Go Cheap, Releasing Bargain Smartphones

Nokia wants to regain its power position within the cellphone business and plans to flood the developing world with cheap phones to do it.

The once mighty Finnish company is set to announce a number of cheap feature phones and smartphones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week in a bid to turn itself around, according to Reuters. Nokia posted six consecutive quarterly losses before returning a small profit last quarter. Still, the company has been soundly thrashed by Apple and Samsung in the smartphone space and sold just 4.4 million Lumia smartphones last quarter, compared to 79.6 million feature phones. It’s clear where Nokia is making most of its money, and it plans to capitalize on that.

But Nokia faces stiff competition to all of its products from dominant players like Apple and Samsung at the high end to lesser-known but still formidable Chinese firms like Huawei and ZTE on the low end. Taiwanese chipmaker Mediatek, for example, has its eyes squarely on the cheap smartphone market in Asia, India and Africa, where it plans to sell unsubsidized smartphones that will cost less than $200.

Nokia has already made sure to offer a variety of very basic smartphones in its Asha lineup. The devices tend to cost less than $100, priced to sell mainly in emerging markets like China and India. Nokia has also made sure that its Lumia lineup is more affordable, with devices like the Lumia 620, a budget Windows Phone 8 phone that starts at $250 without a carrier subsidy.

Making sure that it has the budget devices that appeal to emerging markets will be crucial to Nokia’s future business. But the company will also need to continue pushing its Windows Phone 8 Lumia lineup to catch up in more smartphone-penetrated markets like the U.S. and Europe. Whether it will all be enough to ensure Nokia its leading mobile phone maker position anytime soon is unlikely, but at least the company won’t need to slip further into the abyss.